How To Add A Date And Time Widget To iOS 5 Notification Center On iPhone

One of the beautiful things about Apple’s addition of the Notification Center section to iOS 5 is the ability to quickly get access to certain information, which as we all know is generally notification based. The beauty of being jailbroken is that Notification Center can be extended way beyond its original scope, allowing for all kinds of wonderful things to be displayed.

I am from the way of thinking that simple is most often better when it comes to mobile devices, and the newly released NCDate tweak that hooks into Notification Center couldn’t really be any simpler. The tweak itself simply makes itself at home in the pull down Notification Center screen like any other NC based offering. No additional Springboard icons or configurable options are added to the device as part of this tweak.

After installation, NCDate is activated by heading over to the Notifications section of the Settings.app and setting the toggle to on. The tweak itself will then be located within Notification Center and does nothing more than reading the current time and date from the device and displaying it in a clear and concise manner within NC in its own dedicated tile. Considering the time and date is already displayed on the device in a number of locations including the status bar and the lock screen, I am a little confused as to why it would be needed again in Notification Center, but for those who use NC consistently it may prove useful.

NCDate is available as a free of charge download from the BigBoss repository and requires a jailbroken device running iOS 5.x.

Of course, you will need to jailbreak your device to install this tweak. For jailbreaking the latest iOS 5.1 (tethered), follow the instructions posted here to jailbreak using Redsn0w, or here for Sn0wbreeze. For jailbreaking iPhone 4S and iPad 2, you can simply follow our step by step tutorial posted here to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 using Absinthe on Windows or Mac. Those of you with an iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 1, and iPod touches can use Redsn0w or Sn0wbreeze to untether jailbreak on iOS 5.0.1.